WordPress Dev Chat For 4-29-10

Status Check
Despite the decision to release beta 2 last Monday, the menus are still holding everything up. Work is continuing on the menu system and once it’s close to being finalized, beta 2 will be pushed out. Right now, it looks like Beta 2 will be released in the next few days and hopefully, RC1 after the post code sprint at WordCamp San Francisco is completed. As for Multi-Site, Andrew Nacin pointed out that there are still some bugs that need addressed. Specifically: upload directories, network.php needs non-apache awareness, IIS rewrite rules, and 12142.

GSoC
There are a total of 15 students for this years edition of the Google Summer Of Code. They can be found here along with their respective projects. A more detailed post about this is forthcoming for the dev blog once WCSF is over with. There will also be a public blog for student updates that people can follow if they are interested in a specific project.

JavaScript library preferences
Keep an eye on the WordPress Developers Prologue site as a debate regarding the use of jQeury versus Javascript ensues. According to Filosofo, there are issues with performance, bad design, and bugginess with jQuery.

Menus
One of the big ticket items concerning menus is ticket 13154 where editing menus causes pages/posts to be deleted. There are also some serious styling issues seen in IE6. There are also some drag n drop issues. I encourage you to read the log file as it’s an interesting discussion surrounding menus and IE6.

Ticket 10607
There was a bit of discussion around ticket 10607 that ended up breaking WordPress MU.

WPMU literally used is_null() to check, in a loop, which completely tanked a page. We now return an empty array. No problems if a plugin is using empty(). But we’re introducing back compat issues with is_null. I’m okay with that, but if it was used in MU, who knows where else it was used. If we change it back, we’ll continue to need to occasionally cast as an array, or use empty, et al. This is a change that can break plugins.

Plugin developers are reminded to test their plugins on the beta versions of WordPress to see if this particular change breaks them.

Trashed items interfere with page/post slug generation
Based on ticket 11863. After some discussion, there will be some added messaging for users when they are trying to use a permalink that is already present and held within the trash bin.

How To Participate:

If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.

chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.